Louise Bøttcher

Vygotsky made the statement that the problems associated with disability arise from the social reality of the impairment rather than the impairment in itself (Vygotsky, 1993p. 126-127). However, this statement should not be understood as if Vygotsky thought of disability as social barriers only, such as held forth by the social model approach to disability. The defect – or impairment in a more modern term, affects development, not just as a social category, but as a specific impairment. The disability has a nature, it has a severity that enforces itself on the child’s social situation of development. The disability or specific diagnosis of the child can be important. However, diagnoses and disability categories might be too broad for our analysis. Vygotsky with his special pedagogy did not address deafness per se, but rather the impairment in communication caused by deafness.  Therefore, the cultural-historical theoretical understanding of disability focuses on social distortions – even as the analysis takes the particular impairment into consideration. The social distortions have their source in particular impairments but cannot be predicted from them. The presentation will depart in this visionary idea and through examples of children and young people with communicational disability, elaborate a cultural-historical understanding of sources of developmental delay, problems created by asynchrony with the socio-cultural age periods and developmental opportunities, and possibilities for resolving developmental crises.